She went through the porch into the room itself. She stopped on the threshold and cried out faintly. Everything was changed. The yawning hearth was filled in, and a coal fire was burning in a grate of the latest design. There was a square table in the middle of the room, in place of the long narrow one, with the stout legs and the thick staves, which she had always considered so rude, so uncouth. It was pushed against the wall opposite the new door—the table beneath which so many dead and gone Jaynes had slept off their liquor, the table whose top was ringed with black, ring within ring, each the mark of a wet mug, each telling the tale of some dead joviality.
She had always declared that it was only fit for a public-house. It stood against the wall, its disreputable ringed top discreetly covered with a cloth. They used it as a side-board. There was a filter set out, a soda-water syphon, and various other things.
The china ornaments had gone, the brass candlesticks. The big horsehair-covered chair had been re-covered in shrimp-colored plush. The plaster walls were papered. The thick oak beam above had been whitened with the rest of the ceiling. She thought that the room looked much more light and cheerful, much more suitable for a dining-room. But it was empty. There was no hint of Jethro, no gun in the corner, no cloth cap thrown carelessly down, no heavy boots drying on the hearth; one wouldn’t expect any of those things now. And yet their absence depressed her.
She glided across the thickly-carpeted floor—it was a new carpet—and looked into his own particular little room. Nothing had changed there. The bureau from which he had taken the notes for Edred was open. The shabby rugs were kicked up, the plaster on the walls was in places discolored. His bicycle, all muddy, leaned against the window ledge, his gun, his boots, his cap, his thick woolen gloves were strewn about with masculine carelessness.
“The last thing in the house that a man changes is his own room,” she said, looking tenderly at a shapeless, deplorable old shooting jacket which hung limply on a chair. “But she will make him tidy this place up.”
She! She! She! Who was this girl? She ran through the list of likely maidens—every Jayne or Crisp or Turle or Furlonger under thirty-five. It couldn’t be Peggy Crisp of Liddleshorn. It was probably silly, pretentious Maria Furlonger of the Warren, as Barbara had said.
She turned away, feeling a quick, painful affection for this little, dirty, dim, north room of his—the only room left untouched. She turned away, opened the other door, and went along the corridor, thinking that she might find him in the drawing-room. It was most unlikely; he disliked that room. But then he had always disliked coal fires, new furniture, many lights about the house. She was beginning to realize that only the unlikely would happen at Folly Corner that night.
She turned the handle of the drawing-room door, stole in, and saw with satisfaction that very little had been touched. Her improvements were still rampant. The various slips of Eastern embroidery were disposed about the furniture—awkwardly, by an unskilled, stiff hand. The piano was draped. The door of the china closet stood ajar, showing the dark floor with its gaudy rug and the daintily-finished shelves holding the still daintier family china. The curtains—those curtains which they had bought together at Liddleshorn—were drawn; the standard lamp, which had been one of his last gifts before she went away, burned steadily. There were candles alight on the high shelf—she had always insisted on candles in the drawing-room; they made such cool pin-points of steel-blue and yellow. On one side of the hearth was the one thing that she had always longed for—a cozy corner. She didn’t think that you touched the water-mark of true refinement without a cozy corner. Jethro had stoutly resisted it. Yet there it was; no home-made affair, but a perfect thing, cunningly upholstered in the most artistic style known to Regent Street.
The green sofa, the green chair, were still in the bay—that bay, curtained now, through whose leaded lights she had looked—weighing the uplands thick with grain in all their beauty and plenitude with Edred’s shallow protestations of love and worldly success.
Jethro was lying on the couch half asleep. She had seen him lie so on many autumn evenings when he came in tired after a day’s tramping on the farm, or in the stubble after partridges. He was dozing. She stood under the shade of the standard lamp and looked at him. He surprised her—everything did. He wore a brown velvet coat and waistcoat; his slippers had thin soles.